5000+ years ago when the first cities and states appeared ¹⁸⁹ pyramid-shaped (top-down) social hierarchies came too.

Social hierarchy emerges from a group-based genetic interplay and competition between individuals to create and control environmental conditions (norms and institutions) favorable to their genetic interests, creating an unsustainable framework of inefficient resource extraction and technological innovation.

As these social hierarchies evolved, individuals whose genetic propensities were better aligned with opportunities in their social environments were in a dominant position to acquire social advantages, wealth and power.

Historical sociologist Daniel Chirot writes: “There is little question that the transition from gathering and hunting societies to early agriculture created increasing inequalities of wealth and the subordination of the many by the strong few, and that this was accompanied by a great increase in the incidence of war.”

“The state came to be viewed as the private domain of the ruler, and the people as mere tools of his power, hardly superior to domestic animals.”¹⁹¹

These human barnyards of inequality, controlled by big men, chiefs and kings have not left our social hierarchies—they have merely evolved into more complex political and economic structures. In Europe these inefficient political and economic structures came and went in a fury of social conflicts and war.

For example, “According to military historian Quincy Wright, Europe had five thousand independent political units (mainly baronies and principalities) in the 15^th century, five hundred at the time of the Thirty Years’ War in the early 17^th, two hundred at the time of Napoleon in the early 19^th, and fewer than thirty in 1953.”¹⁹²

Nonetheless, the genetic and historical perseverance of our social hierarchies remains constant.  Attempts to level social hierarchy over the last 5000 years has resulted in a violent pattern–when one social hierarchy falls another one jumps up like a jack-in-the-box to do it all over again.

Historian Walter Scheidel makes this essential point: “Thousands of years of history boil down to a simple truth: ever since the dawn of civilization, ongoing advances in economic capacity and state building favored growing inequality but did little if anything to bring it under control.  Up to and including the Great Compression of 1914 to 1950, we are hard pressed to identify reasonably well attested and nontrivial reductions in material inequality that were not associated, one way or another, with violent shocks.”¹⁹³

Scheidel continues: “…increases in inequality were driven by the interaction of technological and economic development and state formation…effective leveling required violent shocks that at least temporarily curtailed and reversed the disequalizing consequences of capital investment, commercialization, and the exercise of political, military and ideological power by predatory elites and their associates.”¹⁹⁴

The contribution of the jack-in-the-box pattern to the future of the human genome has been resources and quality life years stolen from lower socioeconomic levels of our social hierarchies to benefit the life course happiness of hierarchy elites.

Over the last 5000+ years, approximately .00011% of the planet’s 4.5 billion year existence, the accumulating resource extractions that have fed the status appetites of hierarchy elites has resulted in climate change and a threat to the biosphere.²³⁰  Scientist and author Vaclav Smil makes this point: “Without a biosphere in good shape, there is no life on the planet. It’s very simple. That’s all you need to know. The economists will tell you we can decouple growth from material consumption, but that is total nonsense. The options are quite clear from the historical evidence. If you don’t manage decline, then you succumb to it and you are gone. The best hope is that you find some way to manage it.”²³¹